


And Down it Goes Like Honeycomb

by windandthestars



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Future, Angst, Cryogenics, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-22 19:10:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13770672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windandthestars/pseuds/windandthestars
Summary: He hates that look. It’s been three and a half years and a couple of centuries, but he still hadn’t forgotten that look, the way it tears at his heart.





	And Down it Goes Like Honeycomb

**Author's Note:**

> Another NaNo snippet. This one has most of its moving parts. No major spoilers. Warnings for some (ethically) dodgy dystopian medical practices, and language, anxiety and angst.
> 
> Title and epigraph from 'Over You' by Rotana.

_I hate to admit, but I’ve been everywhere but over you … and everywhere I run I’m caught, caught up in I’m not over you_

 

Twenty four hours. That was the minimum wait time. Usually it would be longer than that but they were particularly interested in younger women, so she’d been allowed an exemption from the usual wait. She knew what it meant, their interest in women of childbearing age, but she hadn’t given it much thought. They wouldn’t wake her until they had a spot for her, a job, an apartment. She would have what she had before. She would have a life and Will could have his unencumbered by the mess she had made.

Twenty four hours feels like an eternity when you have to spend it alone. It’s two in the morning and she’s packing up the last of the boxes, labelling them so the cryobank would know what to do with her things. There’s a couple of things for Jim in a box in the corner, a few boxes of things she wants to keep but everything else is up for grabs. Most of it she knows will be donated or sold and replaced. They could trash it all, she wouldn’t mind as long as the letters got where she intended them to go: one for her parents, another for Jim, and one last plea to Will to forgive her— not for her sake, she doesn’t deserve that, but for his.

Twenty four hours. It’s seven thirty and she hasn’t slept. There isn’t anything here that she feels like she’s missing, that she needs to see or do, but it seems like a shame to waste it all, these last few hours, when she doesn’t know when or where she’ll be waking up, what sort of world she’ll be waking up to.

Nine thirty and she’s in church. She has half an hour to make her appointment and she’s kneeling with her eyes closed praying for the strength to get up and call Jim. She doesn’t want to leave him wondering, guessing. She wants him to know it’ll be ok, that she’ll be ok, but she’s terrified that he’s going to pick up the phone. She’s terrified that he’s going to try and talk her out of this and instead of saying goodbye, fighting with him will be the last thing she does. She doesn’t want that, more than anything she doesn’t want that.

Ten thirty and she’s being poked and prodded for the second day in a row. Twenty four minutes and it’ll be over. Her phone is with her purse and the rest of her personal belongings. If Jim has called her back she’ll never know. There won’t be any voicemails waiting for her when she wakes up. She’d heard his voice for the last time when the recording had picked up. _This is Jim Harper…_

Twenty four seconds. Twenty four of the longest seconds of her life. She’s counting backwards, Will’s face hanging unbidden before her mind’s eye, those had been long seconds too, filled with panic, filled with— she feels the world go hazy, go numb.

When she wakes, for a second, everything is white.

***

He has six weeks left in his mandatory group therapy sessions. He’s now group leader, second only to the therapist who runs the meetings. He’s group leader not, he knows, because he should be, but by virtue of having been here the longest, having been awake the longest. It’s a fluke that most of the others in the group are months behind him; most people opted out of the early mornings once they could, but he hadn’t minded them until he’d been unceremoniously promoted.

He didn’t mind coming early to help set up. He didn’t mind the compassion he had to show, or the example he had to set. He didn’t mind any of that, what he minded, what he hated was knowing that there was another woman in her mid-thirties about to show up for her first session. Another woman, another reminder of Mac. He’d thought he’d finally be free of her here, but here was another woman who didn’t have a mentor, and he was the only senior member of the group without a mentee. 

And here she is, another tall and lanky woman, clumsy and tired looking, but all too like Mac, another reminder, another— and then she looks up and it is Mac, it’s her, MacKenzie as she introduces herself quietly. Her hair’s longer than he’s ever seen it and she’s smaller, shorter somehow than he knows she is, but even before she says anything more than hello, he knows it’s her. 

He wants to scream and put his head through something hard, a wall at the very least, but he’s been with the program, been telling people to get with the program, long enough to know that would be a very very bad idea. He was here to be a well adjusted, productive member of society, if he didn’t feel like cooperating— he tried not to think too much about that, about the people who seemed to suddenly disappear. They disappeared and he, like everyone else, forgot about them, until it seemed they reappeared without warning, because Mac had been gone and now here she was lingering by the door, one hand on either side of the doorframe, peering around the room with wide eyes, still wearing the standard clinic uniform: red shirt and jeans, tennis shoes.

“The doctor said I should come down here.” She says softly when Jack-be-Nimble asks her what he can do to help and Will has to stop himself from snorting.

“They sent you straight down here?” Jack looks concerned as she nods. Will knows that’s against standard protocol, but this isn’t the first time he’s seen a bored nurse decide to shirk their duties.

“They said there’s something wrong with my memory.” She lays a hand on the side of her head and frowns. “I don’t feel like I’ve forgotten anything.”

“Impaired memory recall?” Jack suggests and she nods, takes a step into the room.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means they fucked up again.” Will supplies dryly before Jack can say anything, tired of waiting for her to address him.

“Oh.” She nods, glancing at him briefly, still obviously confused, before looking back toward Jack.

“What year did you enter cryosleep?”

“Twenty one,” she stumbles, “they told me— but the last thing I remember is interviewing for a job at CNN right after the election, the presidential election in oh four. It had to have been—“ She stops, distressed. “They told me, but I don’t know. It all feels so,” she sighs and straightens a bit to take a couple of halting steps toward him before falling into a chair. “This is all so strange.”

*

She didn’t say much during the session. She’d stayed where she’d sat and obediently drank the glasses of juice Jack kept handing her.

“Take her home.” Jack tells him as the others filter out and he sighs, knowing there’s no point in protesting. He knows how this works, protest too much and he’d get demoted, labelled maladjusted.

“Do you have an address?” He asks, turning to where she’s studying a scuff in the floor.

“I—” she fishes through her pockets and pulls out a small screen, turning it over before handing it to him.

He sighs and reaches over to pick up her hand and press it to the screen, ignoring the way she squeaks in surprised protest.

“There.” He points to the picture of her face floating in the corner of the screen and she taps, watches her basic personal information pop up: name, age, occupation, address.

*

She takes a step into the apartment and stops so abruptly he bumps into her.

“Inside,” he prompts, hands on both her shoulders when she doesn’t move.

“I live here?”

“You do now.” He presses her forward and she takes a couple of steps, enough so that he can follow her in and close the door behind them.

He knows to her it looks like a hotel room, bland and austere, but it’s a well appointed apartment for this day and age: wet room bathroom, double bed, table and chairs, dresser, closet, narrow built in bookshelf, and what looks like a sad excuse for a kitchenette but is actually a fully functioning kitchen.

He lets her stand staring, taking in the details he’s trying to ignore. The pantry cupboard is well stocked so he digs around pulling out a granola bar he knows she’ll like and a sealed bowl of custard. The electrolyte mix is on the top shelf so he stretches up and grabs that. It’s cola flavored, which is irrelevant given how disgusting all the flavors were, but at least it would be disgusting in a familiar sort of way.

“You need to drink as much of this as you can.” He holds the can out toward her. “Your system’s filled with cryo-gunk. It’s going to take a while to flush it out. That should help with some of the side effects. One scoop for every glass of water.”

She nods, moving toward him to take a seat at the table as he mixes her a glass.

“There are meds,” he opens the cabinet next to the sink again and rips off the first packet. “They’re labelled. Try and take them on schedule.”

The packets are labelled with dates and times but there isn’t any indication of what the assortment of pills is. There’s a few he can recognize and a few others he’d learned to identify more recently, but from the look on her face she’s clueless and a little more than hesitant.

He opens the packet and spreads the pills across his palm pointing out a couple of them for her. “That’s a multi, vitamin d, that one’s to counteract the cryo-gunk.”

He holds out his hand and she lets him pour the pills into her hand reluctantly. She’s going to have to take them, as ignorant as she was as to what they were, at least until they learned to trust her, until they knew she would stick to the regimen. There was no reason for him to point out the anti-anxiety meds and the sleeping pills he knew would be in the evening packets. She’s going to be furious when she finds out, but it’s better that she be cooperative now when things were still so fragile and uncertain.

“You said you remembered the election?” He asks her as she swallows the last of the pills with a wince at the cloyingly artificial sweetness of the electrolyte mix.

“Hawkins won.” She says firmly. “Do you know if— was that after you?”

“I went under around the same time you did.” He sounds short he realizes when he registers the surprise on her face, the wounded look she tries to hide. He hates that look. It’s been three and a half years and a couple of centuries, but he still hadn’t forgotten that look, the way it tears at his heart. “I left a dark place.” He softens and she offers him a cautious, apologetic smile.

Hawkins had won in oh four and oh eight. She’d figure that out as soon as she figured out how to access the internet. They’d restrict what she could see, there wouldn’t be anything there to disabuse her of the notion that she’s more confused than forgetful, and any of the details, the things she really wanted to know, would have disappeared over the course of time.

They’d let her dig though, they wouldn’t be worried about her finding anything; they’d be more worried about the omnipresent reminders, the things in her possession, the things he might say. He wonders how they had missed it, his relationship with Mac. He wonders if perhaps the lapse in her memory hadn’t been the only glitch in the system. As far as they knew she had lost a couple of weeks, that wasn’t uncommon, but he knows they’re worried it might be more than that. He knows she must have panicked and said too much.

They’d sent her downstairs to group and sent someone to go through her place. It hadn’t been evident at first, but he’s been in enough recent arrival apartments to realize someone had swept through that morning, after the initial crew had set everything up. She wouldn’t know but he thinks there are momentos missing, photo albums and a couple of trinkets. The books he had given her are there, the silver meadowlark he had picked up for her on a trip back to Nebraska to see his sister, but everything else is gone. He knows their breakup had been— it had happened, but he doubts she would have trashed the rest, she had kept the decrepit looking bird after all.

“You’ll start orientation in the morning, back in the building we just left. That should answer all your questions. If you need anything else I’m in your contacts. I have to go to work now. Group meets every morning during the week at six. They’ll expect you there five minutes early, except tomorrow, you’re excused, so I’ll see you on Thursday.”

*

She makes it three weeks before she calls him the first time, panicking. When she calls it’s dark enough to be the middle of the night but it’s only nine pm so he picks up, already cramming his feet into his shoes.

“Will?” Her voice is small, half drown out by the noise in the background, heavy bass and people shouting.

“Where are you?”

“Will, I can’t—”

“Where are you?” He cuts her off.

He manages to exact an address from her although it’s clear she doesn’t know what the place is despite the fact she’s standing in the middle of it. The club isn’t far from his apartment so he keeps her on the line, insisting she talk to him when she tries hanging up on him instead.

She’s found a quieter corner by the time he arrives. It’s quiet enough that he can hear her heavy jagged breathing as he insists again that she meet him out front so he doesn’t have to pay the cover charge. When she finally agrees he waits for her to make her way around the building from where she had been hiding in the back. She doesn’t look hurt, just terrified, so he takes her arm and steers her back in the direction of her apartment, waiting until they’re inside to say something.

“You stopped taking your meds.”

She stares at him, feet drawn up on the bed, as he pulls open the drawers in the kitchen and throws the packets onto the counter: six, eight, and ten pm all for the last week and a half.

“You figured out they track what you toss in the trash?”

She nods and he offers her a smile.

“You should be taking some of these, the vitamins.” He walks over to show her, sorts out the anti-anxiety meds and the sleeping pills. 

“These sleeping pills are mild.” He turns one over in his palm and then looks at her. “Take them if you need them while you have them. They’ll stop prescribing them in a week or so. You’d be better off not asking for more, not for awhile anyway.”

“Take two tonight if you want. Get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“You can’t stay?” She looks a little frantic at the thought of being left alone but doesn’t protest when he shakes his head.

“I have work to finish before I can get to bed.”

“OK. Will?” She hesitates. “Thank you.” She offers him a smile as he turns to leave and he shrugs, tugging the door shut behind him.

*

He hears the door unlock as he makes his way down the hall, so he pushes it open without knocking to find her curled up on the floor by the foot of the bed.

He pulls her up and makes her sit on the bed but she immediately slides back down to the floor, whimpering when he insists she get up again.

“Stay.” He tells her firmly and she shakes her head, keeps shaking it as he digs through the drawer in her kitchen. There’s a bottle of pills, an actual bottle of pills, tiny pills meant to treat breakthrough anxiety; he hasn’t seen these since he’d woken up here. They wouldn’t have been easy for her to get her hands on, not in a bottle like this

This isn’t the first time this has happened, he knows that now, this is only the worst, and he wonders how long she’s been living with this, hiding it, even from him.

He takes the bottle of pills and a glass of water, a scoop of electrolyte mix fizzing in the bottom over to the bed and she shoves him away when he holds the pills out of her reach, offers her the water first.

“Drink some of that.” He prompts her, knocking a pill out of the bottle and tossing the rest onto the bedside table where she’ll have to crawl over him to get to them.

She drinks in big gulps choking it down until he holds out the pill. 

“I already took two.” She tells him after she’s swallowed it and he sighs. He’d figured she had; she would’ve called him as a last resort.

“You have no idea what you’re taking.”

“They work. They were working.” She amends and he knows that that’s what matters to her, that she get through this without making a fuss because she’d learned by now how dangerous making a fuss could be. Compliance was the only thing that mattered. They woke you up for a reason; you were here at their behest. She’d heard that message loud and clear.

“I keep.” She shivers and slumps over onto the mattress, calmer now. “It’s so confusing. I can’t— it makes my head hurt. It’s pounding. It’s so loud. I keep thinking that you’re there but you couldn’t have been. There’s so many people. It’s crowded. They’re excited, but,” she reaches to rub at her ankle, tossing her head across the bedspread, and looks at him.

“I thought maybe it was that night, the one when, the club, but it started there and you weren’t— I don’t understand.”

He knows what she’s feeling, he’d had a couple of memories come back when he’d first woken up, nothing this vivid, mundane things like having coffee in his apartment for the last time, but the influx of sensory information had been overwhelming. He’d learned what triggered the flashes, learned how to wait it out as the memories reasserted themselves, sorted themselves out over time, becoming clearer each time they were triggered.

“This isn’t the first time.”

“No?” She panics a bit, trying to force down her emotions along with everything else as she turns to press her face into the bed and force herself to breathe.

“That’s all right.” He assures her. “Normally things get clearer as time goes on. This one’s just taking a little longer. Tell me what you remember. Try and be specific.”

“I can’t.” She shakes her head and he waits. “It’s a jumbled mess.”

“Try to pick out one thing, something you’re smelling, feeling.”

“I can’t.” She’s insistent but he waits knowing she’ll find something to share. “My ankle,” she reaches to rub it again and he lays his hand over it heavy and bracing. 

“I keep,” she rolls her head to the side laying her ear against the bed to look at him. “I keep feeling your hand on my back. It doesn’t— it can’t. It’s cold and my mouth tastes like that crap you always make me drink.”

He smiles at her encouragingly while he feels his stomach lurch again. He’d had a sinking feeling in his gut since she’d first reached for her ankle and unwittingly flashed him a cocky smile.

He knew what she was remembering. It wasn’t that night at the club, although he can see why this had started there, why she would confuse the two. The amped up energy, the noise, the disorientation of being in the middle of a crowd, the excitement of it.

They had run the marathon together once. She had been hopping around, bouncing in her excitement and had stepped wrong, brought her weight down too heavily on her foot and stumbled, twisted her ankle. He’d been there by her side the entire time, but he couldn’t explain that to her without opening a can of worms, without reminding himself that this MacKenzie was that MacKenzie because he still had a week and a half of this, the phone calls and the platitudes, the open gratitude she showed him. And even without any of that he couldn’t tell her what he knew; it was too dangerous.

*

A week and a half, ten days had become ten hours, but she was still making his life difficult, still insisting she do things her own way.

“No.” She says again and he sighs. She has her fingers tangled in his sleeve and she’s not letting go. He’s going to have to rip her hand free if he wants to leave. “No.”

“MacKenzie.”

He pushes at her lightly but she only doubles down, grasping the back of his shirt with her other hand and another stubborn. “No.”

“You’ll see me tomorrow.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

She’s still trying not to cry, although he’s not sure why. A scene tonight would be better than if she lost it tomorrow at his last group session in a room full of people.

“I need to go.”

“No.” He feels her dig her heels into the floor and knows there’s no way he can drag her far enough across the apartment to make it to the door without making a mess, without making a racket the neighbors would notice. He’s going to have to talk her into letting go.

“It’s almost curfew.” He reminds her, but even that doesn’t seem to mean anything to her now. “I need to—”

“No.” She says more loudly and he has to stop himself from groaning.

“I have to leave, MacKenzie.”

“You want to go?” She looks crushed. “Why, why would you— I don’t want—”

“I heard you.” He cuts her off, “I know you don’t want me to go, but I can’t stay here right now. I know you know that.”

“You can’t leave me.”

“Mac—”

“You can’t. You can’t leave me. You can’t. You can’t.” She’s getting louder, more muddled.

“MacKenzie. Stop.” He says firmly, a little sharply and she freezes bottom lip quivering as she stares at him, carefully unkinking her fingers.

“I don’t want,” she starts but stops herself when he sighs again.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

*

She’s quiet, keeping to herself, sitting in the corner with her slice from the cake someone had brought it. She’s been poking at it, mushing it around her plate enough that at first glance most people would assume she’s eating it, but he’s been keeping an eye on her; her fork hasn’t left her plate.

“Eat that.” He tells her after the others have left and she glances over at him dolefully. She pokes at her plate with her fork a couple of times and he goes back to cleaning up, stacking the chairs in the corner for the last time.

He’s looking forward to being free of this place, relieved he doesn’t have to spend his mornings here, but he’s having a hard time admitting to himself that he feels bad for leaving her like this. He’s done nothing but bite his tongue for six weeks. He hadn’t owed her that. Hadn’t owed her any of this, but she was still so fragile, still so bewildered. She could remember more than she’d been able too, but it only seemed to confuse her more. He could understand why.

“You don’t have to go, do you?”

“You have friends.” He ignores her question and she shakes her head.

“You’re friendly with people at work; you like the people here.” It wasn’t the same thing. He knew that. She hated her job copy editing for a media company. She was friendly enough with the people there to say hello, but he doubts she’s ever had a conversation with any of them and the people here, they were kind to one another but he knew she didn’t trust them, not the way she trusted him. “You like Don. He’s a good match for you.”

“That’s not—” she stabs at her plate hard enough that her fork clinks loudly against the ceramic. 

“I’m leaving in five minutes. Eat your cake so I can go.”

She gets up, glaring at him and dumps the cake in the trash, sets her fork and plate in the appropriate spots and falls back into her chair with a huff.

“Put your chair back when you’re done.” He tells her a moment later as the clock ticks over past the hour. “I’m out of here.”

“Will—” She tries one last time but he only shakes his head and walks out without looking back.

He’s hardly made it around the corner before his phone is ringing. He knows it must be her. He’s not thrilled about picking up but it’s better than a series of increasingly hysterical voicemails, especially given she’s out in public, not as alone as she should be.

“What?”

“Jack said I could still call you.” She tells him when he picks up and he sighs. “He said I had to ask first.”

“He did, did he?”

“Yeah. Will?” She adds when he doesn’t respond.

“What?”

“I can call you, can’t I?”

“You just did.”

“Will,” softer now, he can hear her voice start to waiver.

“Yes, MacKenzie you can still call me.” He had wanted to tell her no, still wants to tell her no, but she’s about to start crying and neither of them need to explain that to Jack, even if Jack is one of the good guys and isn’t about to go ratting her out.

“Can I call you later, after work?”

“If you want.”

“OK.” She isn’t quite smiling he knows, but she’s pleased, pleased enough that she seems all right with letting him hang up. “I’ll talk to you then.”

*

It takes her a week, a near constant string of phone calls over the weekend to convince him he’s better off putting up with her in person than leaving a trail of connections between the two of them.

He shows up late on a Wednesday, knowing he can use the fact that they both have to be to work in the morning as an excuse to leave, knowing public transit stops earlier during the workweek, the artificial curfew the lack of transport creates is enough to keep most people indoors, creates enough of a reason for him to want to head home the second he arrives at her place.

He wants to leave, but she smiles and hands him a can of soda and he finds himself staring at it like he’s never seen one before because there’s no way she could know it was his favorite but she clearly did.

“You always buy them when we’re out somewhere.” She says by way of explanation as he takes a seat at her table, trying not to frown at how easy she makes it sound and not at all like he’d walked around the block with her a few times after group. He’d only stopped at the convenience store to pick up a can a couple of times. It wasn’t a regular thing. 

He never threw the can in his trash, he always used a public bin, but the charges were still on record if anyone cared to look, it rang up as soda, generic, which anyone would assume was the usual artificially sweetened stuff, but he’d rather be careful, so he tried not to make a habit of it, tried not to crave the sugar too badly, but she’d known somehow that he’d had one last weakness.

“I can toss the can at work, get you another one.” She offers as he sighs contentedly, willing himself for a moment to just enjoy it.

“You’d better not be making friends in stupid places.” He warns her and she glares at him suddenly fierce, a reaction, he assumes to whatever Don had been trying to drill into her head.

“It’s a convenience store, Will, not the black market.”

“They’re not called that anymore.”

“What?” Her scowl fades to a frown.

“They’re emporiums.”

“They’re the size of closets.”

“Not a closet anyone from this century is familiar with.” He remind her and she groans.

“Why did I ever think this was a good idea?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.” He’s being careless, letting the familiar comfort of the soda, the sharpness of their exchange lull him into complacency. He needs to be careful, always analyzing, overanalyzing so she doesn’t—

“I missed you.” She smiles a little ruefully as if wondering why, and he wonders for a moment, flushed with panic, if she means then or now, but the worry passes because she’s on her feet, restless, wandering around the apartment.

“I have no idea why.”

“Me either.” She says frankly with the same blunt irony. “You can be a bit of a dick.”

“A bit?” It’s the only thing he can think to offer, a not quite joke that’s only digging them a bigger hole.

“A total dick.” She corrects. “I was trying to be nice. I did miss you.”

“But you don’t anymore.”

“You’re here.” She reminds him and he sighs.

“Yeah I guess I am. Nothing I can do about that.”


End file.
